The Sunday Spotlight – The ‘I Don’t Think You Could Handle Me’ Edition
by Richard Bruton
What’s that? The sound of life just screaming by? Time to slow down a touch. Take 10 minutes. Hell, treat yourself, take 15. It’s the Sunday Spotlight, let’s catch up with a bit of comics news…
SAY NO TO AI! – Outcry online and DC pulls covers work from Francesco Mattina…
This has developed over the last couple of week, starting with artist Adi Granov coming out with this on social media…
‘When image generators first came to prominence the first person who came to mind was the serial plagiarist Francesco Mattina as I thought he’d think all his Christmases have come at once. If you don’t remember, he made a whole career out of photobashing other people’s art (mine included) into whatever you want to call his “work”. I don’t post about artists I dislike, but I neither consider him an artist nor can I hide my dislike for the continued blatant plagiarism.’
Let’s be frank about it – AI-generated art that relies on the AI to scrape the work of other artists is simply theft. No two ways about it.
Well done to Granov for calling it out. But it also highlights the issues publishers have to address regarding AI art. After considerable outcry and a disturbing few days of silence, it was announced that DC Comics had withdrawn all unpublished Mattina covers over the accusations of AI use.
Because, as Granov pointed out:
‘Anyhow, here’s his new cover. Not only is he a hack, but he’s not even good enough to hide the glaring mistake on one of the most iconic symbols in all of pop-culture.’
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Small Press Day 2024 – Saturday 17 August 2024 – Let them know what you’re doing!…
Small Press Day is a UK & Ireland thing where small press, indie comics, self-published, micro-published, call ’em what you want comics are rightly celebrated.
Started by David Ziggy Green in 2016 and now organised by Broken Frontier‘s Andy Oliver and Amneet Johal. They’ll be will be working with shops across the UK and Ireland to make sure 2024 is an even bigger celebration of the small press comics scene.
But why not get involved? Let them know if you have an event you want to put on! Or maybe suggest your local comic shop or book store puts something on?
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Resident Alien TV series renewed for series 4 – congratulations Peter Hogan and Steve Parkhouse…
Announced at Variety, the TV show Resident Alien, adapting the comics by Peter Hogan and Steve Parkhouse, has been renewed for series 4 by NBCUniversal. It’s moving from the Syfy channel to USA Network in the US.
Starring Alan Tudyk as Harry, the alien who crash-landed on Earth and went undercover as a small-town doctor, Resident Alien the TV show is a load of fun and much enjoyed here. Although of course, it goes without saying that the comics are so much better!
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The Boys Humble Bundle – all 12 volumes of the Garth Ennis & Darick Robertson series up for grabs…
You know how it works by now with Humble Bundle, right? They offer up bundles of digital comics and you pay a ridiculously small sum of money for them, with the money being split between charity, publisher and Humble itself. The charity this time is the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund.
This time, just in time for the release of the new series, we have a bundle of Garth Ennis and Darick Robertson’s The Boys. Starting with volume 1 for $1 and going all the way up to all 12 volumes of the series plus eight issues of The Boys: Dear Becky for at least $18. You can find The Boys Humble Bundle here.
Here’s the Humble Bundle bumf…
‘This ain’t your grandpa’s caped crusader. Get all 12 volumes of The Boys, the acclaimed comic series from Garth Ennis and Darick Robertson—and the basis for the hit Amazon TV show. Follow a group of vigilantes as they take on corrupt (and terrifyingly powerful) superheroes in a saga full of grit, dark humor, and relentless action. You’ll also get The Boys: Dear Becky, set 12 years after the events of the mainline series, which uncovers shocking secrets and revives long-simmering vendettas. Pay what you want for this bundle of no-holds-barred superhero action and help support charity with your purchase.’
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Cartoon Museum, London, presents Origins of Comics – Thursday 29 August 2024…
London’s always worth a visit for the exhibitions and the events and the workshops and the sheer damn fine comic goodness of the place – The Cartoon Museum – has announced a special event for just one night…
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Something to bookmark for the future – SEQUENT’ULL Comic Art Festival, Hull, UK, Saturday 31 August 2024…
Organised by the super-talented comics maker and artist Sean Azzopardi, SEQUENT’ULL (best said in a broad Hull/Yorkshire accent, trust me) is a new comics event happening in Hull on Saturday 31 August, 11:00 am to 06:00 pm
More details on this one as they come in, but here’s the poster by the incredibly talented Mark Stafford (whose latest book Salmonella Smorgasboard is a must-buy from Soaring Penguin), who will be there, along with Sean himself and Lucy Sullivan (whose book Barking is another must read for all – get that from Avery Hill).
More details here and tickets here.
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It’s all over… Doctor Who fans now have a long wait until Christmas…
Well, did you watch? Well done for not spoiling any of it for me. Of course, there were plenty of spoilers out there straight away but walking around and refusing to read anything even remotely connected to Doctor Who in the week before the finale of the season meant I went into ‘Empire Of Death‘, the eighth and final part of season one of the Russell T Davies and Ncuti Gatwa Who with just the usual sense of ‘don’t mess it up, don’t mess it up’ that I always get with these things I’ve rather enjoyed.
Now, don’t get me wrong, this series has been… well, let’s say patchy, shall we? When it was good it was damn good. And then there was the not-so-good. But overall, good to have it back, good to have it on the TV, long may it continue.
As for the two-part finale – well, for a start it seems like it’s gone way before it should. A Christmas Special and eight episodes just isn’t enough, especially when the penultimate episode, The Legend of Ruby Sunday, was one of those where it was a hell of a lot of set-up work to build up the finale to something BIG, HUGE, IMPORTANT! You know the way it’s done. And of course, after all that build-up, there’s almost inevitably a sense of hmmmm about the actual climactic events of it all.
As usual, Elizabeth Sandifer does a fine job of reviewing the two-part finale…
This is, of course, the easy episode. Since the structure was developed with Bad Wolf, there’s yet to be a bad first half of a season finale. Even the Chibnall era couldn’t fuck it up. I’m not about to suggest that Davies broke the pattern, but there are plenty of grounds to accuse him of trying. That’s not a bad thing, inherently. Much of this season has comprised of efforts to reshape the rules of how Doctor Who works, which you necessarily do by breaking them. And let’s be clear, it’s had a winning record. Its weakest showings, however, have all come around the basic question of narrative cohesion and pacing, a situation that leaves us in the unfortunate position of having the TARDIS arbitrarily crash into UNIT tower so the Doctor can jump out and basically proclaim “let’s start the season finale.”
So here we are, I suppose.
It’s a pity (though an ironic one), that I already used “There Never Was a Golden Age” on Army of Ghosts/Doomsday. Because this was always going to be the problem. There’s only so forward Russell T Davies could move. The writer of Last of the Time Lords and the secretly terrible Waters of Mars was always going to show up.
I remember this annoyance even. You can basically see it in the “End of Time” post, where my contempt boils over into calling it “an ending so absolute that it does not so much cut off the Davies era as it cuts off the abstract possibility of anything.” I felt it about every season finale of the Davies era. That frustration when the whole and the parts diverge.
